Kitty Canary eBook

He wouldn’t tell me at first, though I could
see he was dying to do it, but after a while he said
Miss Susanna was the sort that found life of the present
day a hard thing to accept, and, fanning himself with
his palm leaf, he looked at me as if I were one of
the reasons she found life hard. “Miss
Susanna,” he said, “is a lady of the old
school where love and honor were placed above riches
and mere material things, and it was a blow to her
to find how readily young people could change their
affections and break their plighted vows and be blind
to their best interests, which was to keep along the
same path and not be tempted out of it by passing
people and worldly ambitions.” And as he
talked in his fine little cambric-needle voice that
sounded as if it came out of a squeaky cabinet, I
knew he was meaning more than he was saying, and I
sat up and listened until he stopped for breath.

“Is that all?” I asked, and got up to
go in, “for if it is I don’t think Miss
Susanna need worry herself. People in one generation
aren’t very different from people in another
where self-interest is concerned. Everybody knows
Mrs. Loraine married her husband for his money, though
loving Mr. Spence, and Miss Susanna was one of her
bridesmaids; and if Elizabeth prefers to marry a rich
man to a poor one, I don’t see anything new
about that.” And also I said it wasn’t
likely that love and honor were ever going to die
out, and a few other things would live a long time
yet, and he need not bother any more than Miss Susanna
concerning present-day young people; and then to my
surprise he asked me to sit down and told me what
he enjoyed telling very much.

CHAPTER XIV

“Everybody has been talking about the way Whythe
Eppes has been rushing you,” he began, fanning
as hard as he could fan, “and several people
have been to see Miss Susanna and told her they thought
your parents ought to know—­”

He didn’t get any further. I stopped him.
It was silly in me to get hot, but I got hot all
right, and in all my life I never wanted anybody as
I wanted Billy right then at my side. He doesn’t
get mad the way I do. He would see that talk
he did not like was stopped in two minutes, but I
was too fighting angry to stop my own tongue, and I
said things to fat Miss Nancy Willie Prince I oughtn’t
to have said. Among them that my parents would
not have permitted me to come to this town or any
other if not perfectly certain I knew how to behave
myself wherever I went, and that whatever was advisable
for them to know concerning me they would know without
the assistance of Miss Bettie Simcoe or Mrs. Caperton
(she is a frisky little widow who has no use for young
girls) or any other Twickenham-Towner. And then,
perhaps because he was so flustered he didn’t
know what he was saying, he told me riches were a
great temptation to any young man, and everybody, of
course, knew my father was wealthy, though he must
say it had not been learned from the family.
And that Whythe, being poor from a money standpoint,
had naturally been tempted, especially as his engagement
had been so recently broken with a girl he had been
in love with since childhood, and I, being young,
didn’t understand and was under the impression
that young men meant all they said, and—­